It is a generally accepted practice amongst organizations with large constituencies to offer customer services to clients. These services come in the form of self-service automation systems including web sites with knowledge base articles, e-commerce interfaces, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, smartphone self-service applications and mobile text messaging and email services. Companies that provide the infrastructure for these systems are well known to customer service practitioners. For example vendors of such infrastructure include: Aspect Communications, Nuance Communications and IBM to name a few.
In addition to these self-service outlets for its customers, enterprises also offer “live” connections to customer service agents and other knowledge workers in order to provide personalized access to discuss billing, order status, troubleshooting and account balance information as a few examples. These types of connections are supported by Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems along with automated attendant systems. In general, these systems are referred to as contact center or call center infrastructure. Vendors who provide contact center infrastructure include Avaya, Cisco, and Five9, for example.
It is typical for larger organizations to use both self-service systems and contact center infrastructure together in order to provide a balance between automated and “live” services for their customers. It is common for some organizations to receive literally thousands of customer inquiries each day, and for this reason it is advantageous for self-service systems and contact center systems to be programmatically connected to other support infrastructure such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Help Desk, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Such support infrastructure is provided by vendors such as Oracle, Salesforce.com and SAP for example.
The connections between all of these self-service, contact center, and support systems are largely customized. Tools to connect and trade data between these systems are often called Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) systems and are provided by vendors such as Genesys Labs and Engehouse, for example. There is also a significant business in systems integration and consulting to facilitate connection between these systems offered by companies such as Accenture, HP and IBM.
These same enterprises that invest heavily in self-service, contact center, and support systems also make significant investments in understanding and tracking the behavior of their users and customers. Ostensibly, a means to capture customer sentiment, customer experience, and trending behavior data yields relevant insight on the level of acceptance of both automated and live communications. Likewise, this data also indicates the overall level of acceptance of an enterprise's products or services.
Many enterprises also use sentiment and customer influence as metrics with which optimal routing and concierge-like services are provided. Take, for example, how “platinum level” customers are given preferential “live” treatment in being routed in contact center systems. The same routing priority applies to Service Level Agreement (SLA) priorities in answering social networking queries in a customer service scenario. For example, some airlines use sophisticated Social Engagement software as part of their overall customer service infrastructure to answer questions or complaints posted by customers on outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. Such systems are called “Social Engagement for Customer Care” systems. Practitioners use standard sentiment metrics in these systems to bump certain social posts higher in priority from an SLA standpoint.
Many attempts have been made to gather customer sentiment, behavior and trend information in the form of off-line surveys or other feedback mechanisms. A common practice, for example, is to “push” a survey pop-up window on a web site after a knowledge base article has been provided to a customer. Questions on such surveys include items such as: “Was this a helpful article?” or “Do you feel like you have your answer?” In addition, customized surveys are commonly used by enterprises and built on an ad-hoc basis. Vendors such as Survey Monkey and Zoho have popular products that facilitate survey instrumentation for both mobile and web-based interactions.
Another way of collecting sentiment or survey information is via automated telephone-based systems. For example, IVR systems will often have a post-call option for customers to take a survey. This is a commonly available option in most IVR systems.
With the growing popularity of social networking and Social Engagement for Customer Care, there are also methods for ascertaining customer behavior and sentiment by collecting bulk data from many customers at the same time. These methods require the use of so-called Big Data or Big Stream technology such as those provided by vendors like GNIP or DataSift, for example. These vendors aggregate social networking and news feeds and provide a curative mechanism for enterprises to filter data for their particular needs.
Other collection mechanisms for web sites include Customer Experience Analytics tools that allow enterprises to collect the electronic “breadcrumbs” of a customer journey in order to understand what parts of the web site a customer visited and what choices were made. This same analytics-based approach can be applied to IVR systems and mobile devices as well. Vendors who provide this Customer Experience Analytics and voice-of-the-customer software include IBM Smarter Commerce and ClickFox, for example.
Once this survey, sentiment, or voice-of-the-customer data is collected and analyzed, it is typically stored in a database. An enterprise will then use Business Intelligence (BI) tools to manipulate the data in order to provide reports and other insights to customer service executives. The tools to do this are commonly available from companies such as Pegasystems, IBM, and Oracle for example.
However, one of the biggest challenges that enterprises face in contemplating the data collected from surveys, sentiment trend data, customer behavior or customer experience, is that by the time some understanding of what the data means can be ascertained, the opportunity to take effective action to help the customer or sway a competitive decision has long since passed. In addition, the ability to ascertain a customer trend and act on it programmatically is not obvious. Heretofore, most survey, sentiment, behavioral, and customer experience data is not “live” nor is it used in close-to-real time for individualized or automated bulk communication.
This gap between customer feedback collection versus tangible and immediate action means there is a fundamental “disconnect” between automated or live customer service and voice-of-the-customer initiatives. That is to say that data collected from surveys, sentiment, trend, behavior and general customer experience data is not used to facilitate real time, individualized or bulk communications in a consistent or programmatic way. In addition, no overlay system that would aggregate such data and synchronize its use across disparate target contact centers or other communication channels has heretofore existed.